Speech:

What it Means to be Colored in the Capital

Speaker:

Mary Church Terrell

As more Black people migrated to Washington D.C. following the Civil War, many white citizens perceived the nation’s capital to be a place that granted Black people the leisure of white society. In 1894, one citizen wrote in the Hawaiian Star that the capital was “a negro aristocracy.” This writer claimed that Washington D.C. was…  Read more.
Speech:

Speech by Samuel Gompers on World War I

Speaker:

Samuel Gompers

Samuel Gompers was a founding member and the first president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). He served as president of the AFL for nearly 40 years, beginning December 8, 1886 and ending when he died on December 13, 1924. Gompers is often regarded as one of the most important leaders in U.S. labor…  Read more.
Speech:

Why a City Should Have a Settlement

Speaker:

Helen Hall

Helen Hall advocated for the importance of settlement houses and social welfare services over the span of her fifty-year career. Born into a white, middle-class family in 1892, Hall entered college expecting to pursue a career in sculpting. However, after one year of art classes, Hall realized she “wanted to stop and find out what…  Read more.
Harry T. Burn
Speech:

The New Citizenship

Speaker:

Rep. Harry T. Burn

On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state—the last needed—to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. In declaring, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” the amendment reversed the Fourteenth Amendment’s…  Read more.
Rose Winslow 1916
Speech:

On Suffrage

Speaker:

Rose Winslow

Rose Winslow (Ruża Wenclawska) was one of many Polish immigrants coming to the United States in the late nineteenth century. Even though we do not know her birth date, we know that she was eleven when her family moved to Pennsylvania presumably in the 1890s. To support her family, she worked ten to twelve-hour days…  Read more.
Theodore Roosevelt in Egypt
Speech:

Law and Order in Egypt

Speaker:

Theodore Roosevelt

After Theodore Roosevelt left the presidency in 1909, he embarked on a 15-month tour of Africa and Europe—a journey that captured the interest and imagination of people at home and abroad. Roosevelt’s adventures were chronicled in the 1910 volume, African Game Trails, where he detailed his enchantment with big game hunting and the geographical, botanical,…  Read more.